Sir,—I was much interested in a letter on “Direction Sense” I saw in the “W.W.G.,” which came to me, in its usual leisurely and belated way, a few days ago. I am the owner of 150 acres of forest. Having been born minus any vestige of direction sense, each time I leave my shack to inspect the interior of my demesne, it is with fear and trembling, as I have no idea when, if ever, I shall get back. They tell me (they who know) that the sun is due south at noon; that the moss only grows on the south side of the trees (or is the north?); and so on, until I am sick of hearing it. I don’t believe a word of it. Anyway, what the Sheitan do I care where the sun is at noon? I am much more concerned to know where I may be at noon. Shall I be home, or drifting about the next Province, gibbering to myself, after the fashion of the “bushed”? And, as for the moss on the trees! Every devil-possessed tree of my many millions is covered with it, up and down and all round. But I can hardly imagine two people losing the direction sense on a mountain, even in a fog. One might as well lose it in the lift at Selfridge’s. On mountain you can surely only be doing one of three things. Either you are going up, or you are coming down, or else you are stepping along a “contour line,” neither up nor down, a most profitless business. But I know enough now to know that the best of white men will occasionally get lost.
The wholly remarkable thing in this letter I speak about is the statement that two men, lost on a mountain in a fog, were, by consulting their map and compass, able to put themselves right. This is the kind of map I have been looking for these many years. I have bought maps by the score, read them by the acre, cursed them, burnt them, torn them up, because not one of them has ever been able to tell me where I was if I didn’t already know myself. They will give me all sorts of other information. Bags of it. But I don’t want it. I want to know how the devil to fetch my shack before dark from the middle of my patch of bush, where I stand, compass and map laid on the snow at my waist, and all three of us lost, hopelessly lost, to the wide, wide world. All because I cannot tell my map, nor it me, where we are. I have done all that the writer of the letter suggests about trying to “remember the relative position of the sun at noon,” and the different angles, &c., even going so far as to divide the result by the day of the month, and I still get lost. I am now going to do what I dare swear there has none done before me. When next I go adventuring into the black heart of my forest, there goes with me one “Planchette.” On the instant that I realise that the inevitable is about to happen, she and I are to have a quiet little séance à deux, and I have no doubt as a result I shall find my hesitating feet placed firmly on the homeward trail, and kept there. So much for “Direction Sense.”
I wonder can it he that I was never meant for a bush-walloper?—Yours, &c.,
Archibald Johnston.
Kapuskasing P. O., Ontario.
February 27th, 1923.
Source info: Journal title and date in cutting.
Heavy facetiousness in reply to Watkins’s letter on the direction sense.